Technology Research in India Kentaro Toyama, PhD Assistant Managing Director Microsoft Research India Presentation to Technology Management Program George Mason University May 23, 2007 – Bangalore A Case Study of Microsoft Research India

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

India People ~1.1 billion people –Over half under 25 years old 22 languages Annual incomes $100-$100M+ 28 states Area ~1/3 the area of United States Technology ~20M PCs, installed base ~140M mobile subscriptions –+7M each month Sources: CIA Factbook, TRAI, CNN Roads in India

India, a Personal View My first trip to India (2004)

India, a Personal View People ~1.1 billion people –Over half under 25 years old 22 official languages Annual incomes $100-$100M+ 28 states Area ~1/3 the area of United States Technology ~20M PCs, installed base ~140M mobile subscriptions –+7M each month but, power held by few tremendous energy and optimism incredible diversity, EM microcosm reminiscent of European Union impact of weather (ubiquity of agriculture) huge interest in PCs, by everyone mobiles, mobiles, everywhere Huge potential opportunity for Microsoft. But, there are new challenges that neither India nor Microsoft have ever faced before.

Rural school in Chinhat, Uttar Pradesh

Rural village with a VSAT Internet connection near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh

A small Internet café on a market street in a town near Bombay

Infosys campus, Bangalore

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

Microsoft Research Established full-time staff in 5 locations –Redmond; Beijing; Cambridge, UK; Mountain View, CA; Bangalore Over 60 computer-science research areas represented –Regular publications in major CS journals and conferences Contributions to Microsoft products –Ranging from development tools, data mining, photo editing, text-to- speech, grammar checking, spam filtering, etc. MSR HQ in Redmond

Microsoft Research Mission Goals: World-class academic research Impact on Microsoft products and business groups Collaborations with external institutions to further technology research worldwide MSR HQ in Redmond

MSR India Mission Goals: World-class academic research Impact on Microsoft products and business groups Collaborations with external institutions to further technology research in India, South Asia, and Emerging Markets Microsoft Research India In Sadashivnagar, Bangalore

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

Microsoft in India Six subsidiaries: Sales & Marketing1990 Software Development1999 Technical Support2003 Consulting Services2004 Research2005 IT Support 2005

Established January, 2005 Six research areas –Cryptography, Security & Algorithms –Digital Geographics –Mobility, Networks & Systems –Multilingual Systems –Rigorous Software Engineering –Technology for Emerging Markets Currently ~50 full-time staff; large internship program Collaborations with government, academia, industry, and NGOs Microsoft Research India In Sadashivnagar, Bangalore MSR India at a Glance

People Full-time staff total: 49 Technical staff total: with PhD (46%) –5 PhD from India –15 PhD from abroad Location before joining: –India: 23 (53%) –Abroad: 20 (47%) 6 women, 34 men (16% women) Competition: IBM, Yahoo!, Bell Labs, HP Labs, Google, Etc. Group photo (January, 2006)

Total internships in 2006: 81 –To date: 122 Institutions represented (40+ total): –India BITS Pilani IIIT-Bangalore IIIT-Hyderabad IISc IITs (Delhi, Madras, Bombay) ISI Calcutta … –Abroad Carnegie Mellon UC Berkeley University of Washington Georgia Tech Harvard Oxford London School of Economics New York University University College London Yale … Lab size over two years Internships

Conferences, Etc. Conferences, workshops, and tutorials co-sponsored or co-organized by MSR India in 2006: Wireless Networking Summit (WiNS) [April 2006, Goa] –2 days, 80+ participants (Victor Bahl, Uday Desai, Mythreyee Ganapathy) ICASSP Tutorial on “Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition” [May 2006, Toulouse] –1 day (Amitav Das) IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on ICT and Development (ICTD) [May 2006, Berkeley] –2 days, 200+ participants (Raj Reddy, Anno Saxenian, Kentaro Toyama) Cryptography summer school [May-Jun 2006, Bangalore] –21 days, 80+ participants (Venkie, Vidya Natampally, Anandan) Afternoon with Design [Aug 2006, Bangalore] –1/2 day, 60+ participants (Archana Prasad) Virtual Earth Academic Summit [Nov-Dec 2006, Redmond] –2 days, 60+ participants (Gur Kimchi, Kentaro Toyama) IJCAI Workshop on AI for ICT and Development [Jan 2007, Hyderabad] –1 day, 20 participants (Kentaro Toyama, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Krithi Ramamritham, Anupam Basu) IJCAI Tutorial on Design in ICT and Development [Jan 2007, Hyderabad] –1/2 day, 30 participants (Bernardine Dias, Rahul Tongia, Kentaro Toyama) Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagset Workshop [Jan 2007, Bangalore] –9 days, 20 participants (A Kumaran) MSR sponsorship and co-organization MSR researcher ledKey:

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

 Cryptographic primitives  New paradigms for cryptanalysis protocols  System and code security  Algorithms  Error-correction problems in machine learning Mathematical and practical aspects of… Cryptography, Security, and Algorithms Goals

Fast Arithmetic for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems Elliptic curve addition Markov-Chain-based analysis of a number system tailored for faster elliptic curve arithmetic in cryptographic systems History –Summer 2005: Early explorations –Early 2006: Refinement and verification –Fall 2006: Tech transfer Transferred: –Arithmetic algorithms –Whiteboxing tool for digital rights management David Jao S. Ramesh Raju Venkie Collaboration with Windows DRM

Digital Geographics Invent new technologies to support digital mapping and location-based services Conduct research in… –Graphics –User interfaces –Spatial databases –Image processing –Visualization –Etc. Goals Auto-generated panoramic map (Neeharika Adabala)

Virtual India Multilingual online map of Indian cities generated from Survey of India data. History –Jan 2005: MoU signed with Ministry of Science & Technology –Jan 2006: Online prototype unveiled by Minister Kapil Sibal –Summer 2006: Tech transfer Transferred: –Tile generation pipeline –Transliteration Person transferred, also –Udayan Khurana [Thapur Institute of Engineering and Technology] (MSR intern  IDC employee) Kannada and Hindi views of Bangalore in Virtual India Joseph Joy and Virtual India virtual team Collaboration with Virtual Earth / Windows Live Local

To conduct research in networked systems: –Internet-scale systems –Distributed systems –Network protocols –Wireless networking –Mobile computing –Sensor networks Goals Mobility, Networks & Systems COMBINE: collaborative downloading

Proximity Networking –SPACE: Lightweight Peer-to-Peer Trust ACM HotNets 2006 –COMBINE: Collaborative Downloading IEEE HotMobile 2007 (to appear) –WiFiAds: Location-sensitive Advertising IEEE HotMobile 2007 (to appear) Sensor Networks –SenSlide: Sensor System for Landslide Prediction ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2007 (to appear) Sample Projects SPACE: establishing peer-to-peer trust Mobility, Networks & Systems

To develop seamless natural-language-neutral approaches in all aspects of linguistic computing To help create an Indic-language research ecosystem Multilingual Systems Goals wikiBABEL project

Transliteration Ontologies Machine Translation Summarization Intonation Studies Language Research SQL Operators wikiBabel Comp. Corpus Corpora Collection & Management POS Tags TTP Language Tools Char-set Conversion Multilingual Systems Project Overview

Improve productivity by bringing rigor to “software development in the large” Look at Microsoft platform from the point of view of partners and customers, and conduct research to improve their productivity Rigorous Software Engineering Vision RSE team, summer 2006

Netra Netra schematic Analysis tool for finding security flaws in access-control configurations History –Fall 2005: Prototype developed –January 2006: Presented to TAB –Fall 2006: Tech transfer Transferred: –Specification language –Analysis tool –Visualization tool Prasad Naldurg Stephan Schwoon Sriram Rajamani John Lambert Collaboration with Secure Windows Initiative

Why India? Cryptography –Extremely bright math students Digital Geographics –Strong interest in mapping Mobility, Networks, and Systems –E.g., Fastest growing mobile-phone market Multilingual Systems –22 national languages, multilingual speakers Rigorous Software Engineering –E.g., world’s most advanced system integrators

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

Technology for Emerging Markets Social: –Understand (potential) technology users in emerging-market countries E.g., urban middle-class E.g., rural entrepreneurs Technical: –Identify applications of computing that support socio-economic development of poor communities worldwide Sugarcane co-op member using a mobile phone to check on details of his harvest in Warana, Maharashtra Goals

Computers in Agriculture Rural Microfinance and ITPeri-Urban Internet Cafes MultiPoint for Education Digital Study Hall IT and Microentrepreneurs Participatory Development Udai Singh Pawar MSc, Physics Randy Wang PhD, Computer Science Jonathan Donner PhD, Communications Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan MPA, International Development Nimmi Rangaswamy PhD, Sociology Rajesh Veeraraghavan MS, Economics and CS Savita Bailur PhD cand., Information Sys. Information ecology of small businesses in developing markets Multiple mice to multiply the value of PCs in schools. DVD exchange over postal service and TVs as display for rural education Study of Internet cafes in areas between urban and rural Experiments with computing and communication systems in agriculture An analysis of ICT in development projects using the lens of post- colonial theory. Preventative Healthcare Indrani Medhi MDes, Design UIs without text for users who are illliterate and may never have seen a computer before Can computers help existing structures for rural microfinance? Technology for Emerging Markets Sample Projects

Text-Free UI Text-free user interface? Indrani Medhi Aman Sagar Kentaro Toyama Identify design principles for designing UIs that allow non-literate, first-time computers user to gain value from their first interaction with a computer. Group: Tech for Emerging Markets Title: “Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Literate Users” Authors: Indrani Medhi, Aman Sagar, Kentaro Toyama Venue: IEEE/ACM First Int’l Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Develompent, UC Berkeley, May Selected for special issue of ITID: ICTD2006 Best Papers!

MultiPoint MultiPoint user studies Multiple mice cheaply multiply the value of PCs in resource- constrained schools. History –Summer 2005: ethnographic studies in rural Indian schools –Fall 2005: First prototype –2006: Tech transfer Transferred: paradigm and SDK Dissemination through Imagine Cup 2007 (was: MultiMouse) Udai Singh Pawar Joyojeet Pal Rahul Gupta Kentaro Toyama Collaboration with Market Expansion Group and Education Core

Outline India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

What the Press Says (1/3) After the tech boom - what's India's next big thing? –“Following the dramatic success of India's IT services companies over the last decade, many industry watchers are now hungrily awaiting the country's next trick - to create a software or hardware giant along the lines of an Indian Google or an Indian Intel.” Steve Ranger, silicon.com, April,

What the Press Says (2/3) India and Innovation at Davos –“The next round of outsourcing is outsourcing innovation. And here India is the center of the global economic universe. By language, training, education, and diasporadic disposition, India's role in the world economic is more brain-driven, service-driven and ultimately innovation driven. And India, chaotic though it may be, is free and democratic. You don't have an army of censors watching over the internet and blogs, as you do in China.” Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek (Jan 20, 2006)

India an innovation giant? Yes! –“…innovation includes services, manufacturing processes, customer facing and back-end process in services.” –“To me, Bharati Airtel is the most innovative company of our times for the way it has created a successful business model. The company has outsourced everything but its customers, thus being able to offer mobile telephony at 10 paise a minute; nowhere in the world can you get such rates.” –S. Kapur, Business Standard, February 21, 2007 What the Press Says (3/3)

Firms with Labs in India

Conclusion India Microsoft Research Microsoft Research India –Overview –Research Groups Technology for Emerging Markets Beyond Microsoft

Rajkumar Riots Kannada film actor, Rajkumar passed away on April 12, He lived within several blocks of MSR India. Fans and riff-raff rioted, imitating riots following his kidnapping in Most building windows were broken. No physical harm to lab members. Building fully restored, thanks to insurance.

Code4Bill Contest The Prize: Write code for Bill Gates, reporting to his technical assistant for one year Seven-month contest run by MS India DPE –Three rounds of puzzles and coding challenges online –Two rounds of interviews –Final round of presentations, winner selected by jury –24,000 contestants –19 in last round, all offered (and took) internships with Microsoft. –Four interned at MSR India. And, the winner is… –Abishek Kumarasubramanian IIT-Madras –Earlier worked at MSR India as an intern –Currently working as an assistant researcher at MSR until visa issues clear Abishek with Bill Gates’s then technical assistant, Alex Gounares

Thank you! Questions?